December 25, 2012

It was three, maybe four o’clock in the morning when he first saw them. Grad student Jeff Bowman was on the deck of a ship; he and a University of Washington biology team were on their way back from the North Pole. It was cold outside, the temperature had just dropped, and as the dawn broke, he could see a few, then more, then even more of these little flowery things, growing on the frozen sea.

“I was absolutely astounded,” he says. They were little protrusions of ice, delicate, like snowflakes. They began growing in the dry, cold air “like a meadow spreading off in all directions. Every available surface was covered with them.” What are they?

“Frost flowers,” he was told. “I’d never heard of them,” Jeff says, “but they were everywhere.”

They aren’t flowers, of course. They are more like ice sculptures that grow on the border between the sea and air. On Sept. 2, 2009, the day Jeff’s colleague Matthias Wietz took these pictures, the air was extremely cold and extremely dry, colder than the ocean surface. When the air gets that different from the sea, the dryness pulls moisture off little bumps in the ice, bits of ice vaporize, the air gets humid — but only for a while. The cold makes water vapor heavy. The air wants to release that excess weight, so crystal by crystal, air turns back into ice, creating delicate, feathery tendrils that reach sometimes two, three inches high, like giant snowflakes. The sea, literally, blossoms.

December 24, 2012

Above, more of my interview with JPL’s Eric Rignot at AGU. Dr. Rignot, one of the most respected experts on Antarctic ice metrics, discusses ice balance and the impact of IMBIE – the recently published Ice Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise which brought together divergent data sets on ice sheet dynamics.

Timely due to this weekend’s announcement of recent observations of temperature increase over the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

OSLO, Dec 23 (Reuters) – West Antarctica is warming almost twice as fast as previously believed, adding to worries of a thaw that would add to sea level rise from San Francisco to Shanghai, a study showed on Sunday.

Annual average temperatures at the Byrd research station in West Antarctica had risen 2.4 degrees Celsius (4.3F) since the 1950s, one of the fastest gains on the planet and three times the global average in a changing climate, it said.

The unexpectedly big increase adds to fears the ice sheet is vulnerable to thawing. West Antarctica holds enough ice to raise world sea levels by at least 3.3 metres (11 feet) if it ever all melted, a process that would take centuries.

“The western part of the ice sheet is experiencing nearly twice as much warming as previously thought,” Ohio State University said in a statement of the study led by its geography professor David Bromwich.

The warming “raises further concerns about the future contribution of Antarctica to sea level rise,” it said. Higher summer temperatures raised risks of a surface melt of ice and snow even though most of Antarctica is in a year-round deep freeze.

December 24, 2012

The world’s largest insurers are tallying the costs of climate inaction, and the numbers are staggering.

Swiss Re announced recently that total economic losses in 2012 from “natural catastrophes and man-made disasters” — primarily weather events — should reach roughly $140 billion. Over 11,000 lives were lost due to the so-called “natural catastrophes” alone.

“Hurricane Sandy is the largest Atlantic hurricane on record in terms of wind span. This record storm surge caused widespread flooding and damage to a densely populated area on the East Coast of the U.S. It also led to the worst power outage caused by a natural catastrophe in the history of the U.S.”

But Sandy wasn’t the only event to blame. According to the report, “extremely dry weather conditions and limited snowfall in the U.S. led to one of the worst droughts in recent decades, affecting more than half of the country. Drought-related agricultural losses are likely to reach approximately $11 billion, including pay-outs from federal assistance programs.

December 24, 2012

FOR those who advocate the electrification of the automobile, it has been a good year. No fewer than eight significant plug-in models came to market in the United States in 2012.

That’s progress, but even if the absolute number was modest, the heft of the companies behind them could not be ignored: battery-electric and plug-in hybrid cars arrived from BMW and Honda, while Ford and Toyota each released two. Tesla and Coda, California-based electric specialists, offered sedans with starkly different levels of appeal.

So it may be tempting to declare 2012 the year of the electric car — at least until you consider that many of these debuts were for limited production runs of a couple of thousand vehicles. When the year’s final sales figures are reported, cars with plugs will still represent only about one-third of 1 percent of the new-car market.

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Despite their small share of overall sales, plug-in cars seem to have established a beachhead this year, regardless of the ups and downs revealed in the year’s electric car headlines.

TESLA MODEL S In January, Franz von Holzhausen, design chief at Tesla Motors, promised that the first car designed and produced entirely by the start-up, the Model S, would not only be a good E.V. but “the best sedan on the planet.”

At the time, auto reviewers mostly dismissed the words as more Silicon Valley braggadocio. But once they drove the car, many who had been Tesla doubters became E.V. believers. Automobile magazine and Motor Trend each named the Model S its car of the year.

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NISSAN LEAF WILTS Tesla was not the only company that failed to meet E.V. sales goals in 2012. Nissan struggled to find customers for its all-electric Leaf compact. But even with tepid sales in the first few months of the year, Carlos Ghosn, Nissan’s chief executive and one of the auto industry’s most outspoken E.V. proponents, stood firm: “I am not changing my bullish approach,” he told reporters at the New York auto show in April.

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RIUS GOES MAINSTREAM Toyota added a plug-in version to its growing family of Prius hybrids in 2012. It also added the extra-capacity Prius V wagon and the subcompact Prius C, rated at 53 m.p.g. in city driving. Prius is now the No. 1 selling line of cars in California.

It took 15 years for the Prius to grow from an avant-garde experiment, to a high-volume product line. In 2012, Toyota will sell more than one million hybrids globally.

December 20, 2012

November 2012 also marks the 36thconsecutive November and 333rd consecutive month with global temperature higher than the long-term average. The last month with a below average temperature was February 1985, nearly 28 years ago.

December 19, 2012

I talked to a whole lot of scientists at this year’s American Geophysical Union Conference, and a number of them took time for interviews. I’ll be building videos around these in the coming year, but for now, here is a sampling of perspectives on what we know now, and what we’re looking for in 2013.

Included are Charles Miller of NASA JPL and Ben Abbott of U. of Alaska, on permafrost. Texas A&M’s Andrew Dessler on Extreme weather attributions, Eric Rignot of JPL on polar ice, Robert Rohde, lead scientists of Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, Ben Santer on IPCC models and the upcoming report, Ted Scambos of National Snow and Ice Data Center – on Snow and Ice Data, and Jason Box of Byrd Center on Greenland melt.